DIY Steampunk Nursery: Part 1 – Painting The Walls

AJ’s nursery is still a work-in-progress, but I finally realized that if I wait until it’s 100% finished, I’ll never get around to sharing it! We’re still decorating and adding some fun finishing touches, but it’s mostly done, and AJ is already 9 months old, so it’s about time to reveal some of the fun stuff we’ve done in there!

When we first moved into this house, I was using this room as my craft room while we did our the garage remodel. My plan had always been to use the second story of the detached garage as my craft room/home office, but the garage was just bare studs (no insulation or drywall), so we had to do a little work to it before it was really usable space for anything other than storage. In the meantime, I put my craft desk and craft supplies in this spare bedroom and used it as my temporary craft room.

We found out I was pregnant in January 2015, and I knew I’d have to vacate the spare bedroom so we could turn it into a nursery. Unfortunately our garage remodel was taking longer than we’d hoped, so in the first week in September (four weeks before AJ’s due date), I finally decided I needed to box up all my craft stuff and put it in the basement since the garage wasn’t quite ready. I was 36 weeks pregnant at the time, but luckily my Dad was in town, so after I got everything boxed up, he and JM carried all the heavy boxes down to the basement for me. And then we were ready to start painting!

I knew that the basis of our steampunk themed nursery would be pink and grey striped walls, white wainscoting, and pink and grey decor with metallic accents. BEHR graciously offered to send me paint from their MARQUEE® Interior Color Collection, so we grabbed a couple samples from our local Home Depot and painted a few swatches.

The first thing we did was tape off the trim around the doors and windows, the baseboards, and the ceiling with painter’s tape.

NOTE: I say “we”, but JM really did the bulk of the work. I definitely helped where I could, but I was 37 weeks pregnant at this point!

Once everything was taped off, it was time to start painting!

The painting actually went EXTREMELY quickly! First, we were only painting the top two thirds of the walls because we were planning to put wainscoting along the bottom third, and second, the BEHR MARQUEE® interior paint goes on really smoothly and covers really well! We certainly had no coverage issues while painting over the previous wall color (a very light ivory), but JM also painted right over our darker test swatches, and with just one coat it was completely covered.

Once the pink paint was dry, we measured for the grey stripes, and put up painter’s tape to mark the edges.

Then we painted the grey stripes. Again the paint went on super smooth and with just one coat, we were done!

We decided to do an additional skinny accent stripe using semi-gloss grey inside of the matte grey stripe. So we measured and marked with painter’s tape again, and this time we painted the semi-gloss grey stripe by hand with a brush instead of a roller because it was so skinny.

And once the semi-gloss grey stripes dried, we were done! At least with the painting part… 🙂

Next I’ll show you guys how we added the wainscoting and wallpaper to cover up the bottom third of the wall. Stay tuned!

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Disclosure: I received paint from BEHR to complete this project, but the BEHR MARQUEE® Interior Color Collection paints are all seriously amazing and all opinions in this post are 100% my own. I would never write a post about something I didn’t think was useful or interesting for you guys, and Practically Functional will only publish sponsored posts for companies or products I love and believe in! 🙂

I believe that anyone can do crafts and DIY projects, regardless of skill or experience. I love sharing simple craft ideas, step by step DIY project tutorials, cleaning hacks, and other tips and tricks all with one goal in mind: giving you the tools you need to “do it yourself”, complete fun projects, and make awesome things!

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